Category Archives: Found In The Connection

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I was never much of a Village Voice aficionado, so I’m neither here nor there–neither sad nor smug–regarding the demise of their print edition.

But all credit to whoever had charge of the last front page…and decided they wouldn’t go out with a whimper:

Bob, being a committed capitalist, does not always go along with the idea that his copyrighted material should be readily available on YouTube. Sometimes you can find his original recordings and sometimes not. This one doesn’t seem to be up there right now, so, in lieu of the crappily recorded live versions, re-mixes, etc. I offer Ms. LaBelle’s version, which exemplifies the notion that the world never does stand still…

I normally don’t think much about Easy Rider. I saw the movie somewhere along the way and my general reaction was “I guess you had to be there.”

Then I ran across Ileana Douglas’ top ten movies at the Criterion Collection website (which you can view here), which led me to her twitter page, which led me to her podcasts, which you can sample here–highly recommended, just be sure you have some time on your hands because it’s kind of addicting.)

But one quote from her comments on the first time she saw Easy Rider stuck out.

…let me tell you, the first time I saw it on TV, all cut up, I thought: This is the movie that ruined our lives and turned us into dirty hippies? I just didn’t get it.

By “our’ and “us” she meant her own family, especially her father, who took the movie for a road map on how to live the rest of his life, an obsession that was bound to have an effect on his then five-year-old daughter.

Her father, as it happened, was the son of a famous Hollywood actor who called himself Melvyn Douglas (the family name was Hesselberg). Douglas herself, chose her grandfather’s profession and adopted his surname. And eventually she came to terms with both her “dirty hippy” upbringing and Easy Rider. Hence its inclusion in her Top Ten Criterion films (which I recommend reading in full–on top of her abundantly self-evident charms, she’s an excellent writer).

I’ll probably watch Easy Rider again at some point. Movies sometimes grow with repeated viewings. And no movie can be entirely without existential interest if the main characters are based on Roger McGuinn and David Crosby.

And I’ll keep Ms. Douglas’ reassessment in mind.

But I’m pretty sure one thing will stick in my craw. That’s the ending, which imagines the Modern Southern Redneck, not as the natural ally of hippie culture that he was (I’m speaking as someone who grew up around as many rednecks as Ileana did hippies), but as an extension of the Klan, come out from under the sheets and gone hunting hippies.

One can never say something-or-other didn’t happen to somebody-or-other somewhere-or-other some-time-or-other.

Maybe somewhere, sometime, some hillbilly killed a hippy for the frivolous reasons presented in Easy Rider (frivolous as in “I just don’t like them sons-a-bitches. Let’s shoot ’em!”)

For a better look at the real flavor of backwoods’ paranoia, I’d recommend Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort, which came out in the early eighties (and seemed to take something out of Hill, who was never quite the same again).

But you can get the gist from the music that defined the relationship between the hillbillies and the hippies–Charlie Daniel’s “Long-Haired Country Boy,” Hank Williams Jr.’s truly paranoid “Country Boy Can Survive,” and especially Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road” which circles back to Viet Nam, catches up the whole story and brings it to its natural conclusion.

The message from the hardcore hillbilly has been the same going all the way back to the Scottish highlands.

Best leave me the hell alone.

In this respect, at least, Easy Rider took the easy way out.

Just like the rest of the country.

Left us with the movie–and the world–that defined my childhood…Which was much tougher, much funnier, didn’t tell a single lie, and didn’t have the answers either.

May have to write about that some day.

Meanwhile, I’ll just keep in touch with that other world I didn’t quite grow up in, in the usual way. By listening…

Between Twitter, Facebook and the Blogosphere, I follow at least one of everybody. There’s no other way to keep up these days and, honestly, all of ya’ll bear watching.

I keep most of what I find to myself, but there was something today that forces me to respond.

Not there. It wouldn’t do any good, no matter where “there” happened to be.

Whatever social media was supposed to be in theory, in the mean old world where it operates, it’s an echo chamber where people go to feel and express two emotions at the exclusion of all else: rage and the warm glow of being told they are right….about everything.

Today, the extreme right wing white nationalist I follow on twitter linked to a record by a white man.

It was the first time she had heard it and she was compelled to comment on it’s incredible beauty. By her profile she looks to be twenty-something. By her tart responses to anyone foolish enough to confront her on her own turf, she’s highly intelligent (extremists of every stripe often are).

She responded to this particular song as though it were an incredible piece of her white heritage which had been kept from her by the dark forces of a lost world.

She could hear it only as an example of white pride–could believe such things have been pushed to the margins (where their very creation is no longer conceivable in this Brave New World), and kept from her only by an insane application of diversity theory.

That’s the problem with throwing your Culture away.

When some piece of it bobs up among the waves that swept you away, whoever is looking for a life raft is apt to grab on….and make of it what they will.

The song?

What do you think.

By who?

Who do you think.

Just try to imagine hearing it for the first time on the other side of whatever journey brought that highly intelligent young woman to the place where she is now….a place where it sounds as it if could have emerged from those waves only after a thousand years of what she has convinced herself is the only viable reality….

Goodbye us.

I do sort of wonder what she’ll make of this, if she follows the YouTube thread…

Not sure if it was the presence of Vicki Peterson (subbing for Charlotte Caffey), or the acoustics in Jay Leno’s old studio, or the awareness that it was a one off to promote a song that cut everything on the radio to shreds the three or four times it played in your market before it disappeared, but this is the best live singing I’ve ever heard from the last great rock ‘n’ roll band:

On the outtake disc for whatever Special Edition of Tusk it is that I own, Fleetwood Mac’s version of the Beach Boys’ “Farmer’s Daughter” has never sounded like much more than Lindsey Buckingham’s throwaway homage to Brian Wilson.

Caught at random on YouTube the other day, it sounded like one of those secret gifts the radio used to bring. …

…I wonder if that’s because, in ways that the mere calendar can’t do more than hint at, we’re so much further away from them than they were from 1962?

I listen to Rhino’s old 2-disc Warren Zevon anthology I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead with fair frequency. Who doesn’t want to drift off to sleep to the sounds of “Detox Mansion” or “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” or “I predict this motel will be standing until I pay my bill?”

I don’t know why it is, then, that I never appreciated his version of “Raspberry Beret” (cut with R.E.M. posing as Hindu Love Gods) before this week. I mean, I always liked it and I always shared a wry smile with the ten thousand others who have noted how much “Raspberry Beret,” a hit for Prince in 1985, sounded like Warren Zevon, circa 1976. But it never really stood out before.

Maybe that’s because I never realized what a perfect song it would have made for a nineteen-year-old Elvis, if he had been born two generation later, walked into a studio around 1990 (when Zevon’s version was released, though it was recorded in 1987) and got some off-the-wall producer to listen to him goofing off with it. And maybe I never realized that before because, if Elvis hadn’t been born in 1935, Prince and Warren Zevon would have been about as well known in 1985 (or 1990) as Arthur Crudup and Bill Monroe were in 1954.

The Revolution (you know, the one that’s always deemed inevitable once someone makes it happen) would have still been waiting. (Yes, yes, debate the validity of alternate universes amongst yourselves, but rest assured my anonymous sources are unimpeachable.)

Would we be better off in 2017 if somebody scrambled the time-line?

Well….

Excuse me while I venture forth to commune with the departed shade of Philip K. Dick….He keeps telling me he knows all about this stuff. He just can’t tell me whether I’ll face eternal damnation if I bring the drugs.

Today, on the radio. Chrissie Hynde’s lament for her OD’d guitar player. From 1982….a year which felt exactly like this death song when it happened (you know, for those who, like Ms. Hynde, were gifted or cursed with second sight) and is now repeating itself for the thirty-fifth consecutive time. For some reason, today, it sounded like shelter from the storm….

You can enter the YouTube rabbit hole at your own risk and track down the live versions Bobbie Gentry performed on various television shows over most of the next decade and literally bear witness as the song takes over first her career and then her life. Each version has its own revelations, but I prefer the one heard here, before the flood consumed even the delicate and beautiful nuances of her accent, a process that had already begun with the recorded version itself, one of the greatest records ever made, which, after half a century of speculation and forty years of Gentry playing the Garbo of the Delta, remains untouchable.

I confess I didn’t know that, in his last decade on the road, Gregg Allman, became only the third singer to really understand “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Dozens, if not hundreds, have tried, including a lot of gifted Yanks (Joan Baez, Richie Havens, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Shawn Colvin, who did probably the best sounding version) and the Yankeeest Southerner who ever lived, Johnny Cash (who proved you could be that and still be loved by the Southernest Southerners and who, perhaps for both those reasons, was completely confounded by the song on every level).

Out of all that and much, much more, only Levon Helm, Tanya Tucker and Allman got all the way inside it.

I offer a mea culpa as I assumed he was an oldies act.

Instead, he went down swinging, or at least figuring out it should have been “we was hungry” all along.

I’ve been authorized by the counter-illuminati to release the following portion of my personal batch of the Jagger/Satan transcripts. (The transcripts are handled rather like repair manuals for nuclear submarines…each person is only allowed to know so much. We want to make it as hard as possible for the Enemy to assemble the entire package. He’s very tricky….)

Satan: I’ll be needing the drummer.MJ: What? Charlie? Already? You can’t take Charlie!Satan: Of course, you can always substitute yourself. Remember?MJ: Oh, alright then. But just his soul. We’ll be needing his hands…

(To be continued, at the Council’s discrimination)

…And please, no inquiries as to this Sullivan fellow’s deal. I’m told even the Space Station guys don’t have access to that information.